ACCU Menu

Advertisement

Advertisement

Membership

Login

ACCU Buttons

Add them to your site:

Search in Book Reviews

The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review.
The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers.
Currently there are 1918 reviews in the database and more every month.
Search is a simple string search in either book title or book author. The full text search
is a search of the text of the review.

This is a book aimed at undergraduate level students who are
computer literate with previous programming experience an advantage but not
required. The author has a style of teaching that is quite unusual in my
experience. That is, each data type, programming concept etc. is introduced
as it is needed and not before, so as not to immediately swamp the beginner
with too much information. This allows the basics to be explained fully
before more involved concepts such as pointers turn up in chapter 11. The
explanation of pointers is, thankfully, one of the clearest I have seen.
This 'need-to-know' style means that other troublesome areas such as dynamic
memory allocation and bitwise operations are left almost to the end.

The second half of the book contains chapters on structuring multi-file
programs, abstract data types, error handling and the standard library
functions. Tacked onto the end of the chapter on program design is a 22-page
introduction to C++. This does little more than skim the surface (think of
Bjarne Stroustrup's chapter 'A Tour of C++' in 'The C++ Programming
Language'). Since this special feature is identified on the cover, I assume
it was included to help sell a book on an old fashioned language like C.

The book is nicely laid out with plenty of diagrams, code fragments and
interesting example programs. Aside from a few unidentified portability
issues, a few typos in the code and in the text, there is very little I can
find to criticise this book for and a lot I wish other authors would
emulate.